Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds & VR

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Normally Erika Thereian is blonde and California tan, an avatar hybrid of Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson,
nothing less than the archetypal white girl of the world's dreams.
Recently her friend Chip Midnight asked her to model his latest
"skin"-- not an unusual request, since Midnight is a long-established master
in the creation of customized avatar skins that Residents make, buy,
and wear, when they're going for a look that Linden Lab's avatar
adjustment sliders can't achieve. She'd wear Chip Midnight's latest
skin around Second Life to build up word of mouth, and generate sales.
"I often throw her my new stuff to take for a spin," Midnight explains
to me. "She's very social, so she's a good way to get feedback." Viral
marketing at its most immersive.

But when she wore one of Chip's recent skins, it also became, as Erika tells me, "[A]lmost a Black like Me thing."

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

A unique solution to the high cost of higher education (originally published here)...

For awhile there, he could put himself through college by floating
the tuition with his credit card, and with his job selling
refrigerators and such at a department store chain. But when one thing
led to another (as they're often apt to do), Lordfly Digeridoo found
himself $4000 in debt, with no immediate means to pay off his creditors.

This is usually the part in the story where the broke college kid
sucks it up and goes back to his parents, hat in hand. Instead,
Digeridoo (who does in fact have a hat in SL, except it also functions
as a calculator, a helicopter, and other useful devices), put a
proposition before his fellow Residents:

"[B]asically, an unsecured, long-term L$ loan given by the community
at large. The only collateral I'm able to give is my good standing
within the community (or perceived one, anyway)."

It was a simple proposal: people would loan Linden Dollars to him,
he'd keep a running tally of who gave what, and use that to pay off his
college tuition. And when things were turned around for him, he'd pay
people back in the order they paid him. It's an experiment in the trust
and generosity of a social network that only really exists in a virtual
world. ("I could in fact take all this money and throw it into the
stock market or something, cackling insanely as I sip tequila in
Bermuda," he acknowledged in the Forum post
announcing his scheme. "It IS an unsecured loan, after all".) But
Digeridoo has been a Resident since 2003 (ancient, by the world's
standards), and a well-established SL architect. Perhaps because of
that-- or just the general fungibility of virtual currency for random
acts of whimsy-- within two days, he's collected over $700 in loans.

"[P]eople have been wiring me money to help me fend off the debt in
real life," he tells me, amazed. "Yes, dozens of people from Second
Life, many of whom I've never met. If anything I've learned there's
either a lot of lurkers on the Forums, or word of mouth spreads fast."
To keep things transparent, he posts the running tally of donations in
his SL profile. "Seeing as the public is donating, it only fits to have the number displayed for the public," he says.

Once he's stabilized, he plans to start paying off the community of
loaners with Linden Dollars. Much of those funds will come from his
in-world businesses-- prefab homes, land development, and the odd
custom buildings, assignments he does for the L$ equivalent of
US$20-30, usually. (He may even auction off some of his old buildings,
like the famed Digeridoo Tower,
which now exists only in his inventory.) As it happens, he's also
applied his SL building skills in college, as a Urban and Regional
Planning major-- such as an assignment to build a scale model of Rome's Piazza Novona.

For all that, however, Lordfly Digeridoo believes the time has
passed when someone like him could earn a full income as a creator in
Second Life.

"I've been obsoleted by the content developer teams," he says.
"Remember back in the day in SL, 2003 or so? The world was small;
almost everyone had a small niche they could fill, and fill it well.
When I started, that niche was custom builds... I had virtually no
competition for at least six months. Simply nobody else was building
homes for people on a case-by-case basis."

Not so now, he believes.

"[W]e've got gigantic economies of scale going on," he speculates,
"or at least the beginnings of such. Who's going to hire a broke
college kid to develop a sim or a large area when they can just hand it
to Bedazzle or someone with an architecture degree?"

Besides which, he hasn't been too happy with recent clientele,
who've demanded to know why he doesn't sell "McMansion" prefabs, or
customers who insist on having a virtual home with a virtual bathroom.

"[B]uilding clients who can't fathom living in a house without a
working toilet," he says, "so they demand space and design requirements
for real life amenities that are a) pointless in SL, and b) expensive.
There's a small minority of people like me who build with SL in mind:
open spaces, open floorplans, no superfluous extra rooms, designed with
the camera in mind, keep the toilets out kthxbye."

So he keeps at his college studies, hoping for graduate school and a
better job outside SL. Once he's settled his current debt, that is.

"At the latest, I'm hoping to have them paid off within 6 months,"
Digeridoo tells me. "I'm a stubborn guy, Hamlet. Once I set my mind to
something it's done eventually." He grins. "Hence me slogging through
college without proper financial backing."

He's been surprised at some of the Residents who are helping him
along now-- not just those who don't know him at all, but all those who
know him well, and share a mutual dislike.

"There's been quite a few people who I've had visible sparring
matches on the Forums, or who otherwise I wouldn't exactly consider us
'cordial', giving me boatloads of cash," he says. "I've found myself
extremely humbled by the generosity of people, and yeah, I've been
hanging off the Forums a bit lately.

The Linden Dollar college fund of Lordfly Digeridoo is still
accepting loans. But while they are loans, they're designated
interest-free.

"I didn't want people able to 'invest' in my personal financial
misery," he explains. "We have credit card companies for that, after
all."